Robin Clarke’s inventive and brave first collection of
poems is not a book that makes you feel better; it is a book that makes you
feel. It does not necessarily bring comfort or spiritual discovery—though it
could lead to those things. Using an approach that is both collective and
personal, the poet meditates on mining culture, on the prison system, on the
health care system, on corporate seizure of resources and on systematic
economic failure, on attendant environment disasters; in so doing, she always
keeps attention on the specifics of working people and their struggles. The three
sequences here are full of detailed fragments of incidents—never completely
spelled out—that allude to illness and injury, details of childhood, family
history, showing humans and earth as victims of the mines and of both slow and
sudden disasters, yet the result is somehow ultimately redemptive.

Hers
is a collection of documentary poems built via collage, some composed using
specifics directly from a series of documents, stretched out across three
sections—“My Father or the Prisoner Before Him,” “In the Building Coming Down”
and “Lines the Quarry.” In the first section, she writes: “The mine collapsed
under the weight of its many / false documents.” These are poems composed out
of striking lines pressed firmly into and against each other, all of which contain
a brutal honesty, as well as a series of challenges: “The women of Harlan
County used a cadillac / to stop the train. And began singing. Which side are you / on?” This book is comparable to
Brian Teare’s recent title with Omnidawn, Companion Grasses (2013) [see my review of such here], for their meditative
stretches, shared ecological attentiveness and their book-length units of
composition, yet Clarke’s poems also seek discomfort, and almost demand the
reader respond in some way. Honestly, it would be impossible not to respond to these poems. In terms
of some of the structure of short phrases collaged into each other to produce a
series of accumulative stretches, as well as for their shared exploration of
environmentalism and personal-political responsibilities, one could even
compare this to Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s recent collaborative re-issue Sybil Unrest (New Star Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Very much in the territory of “eco-poetry,” Clarke depicts,
describes and laments needless destruction of the natural world through
excessive mining, utilizing and lifting a language of nursery rhymes and song, implicating
numerous structures in the physical destruction of the earth, all of which have
been created by human hands. In terms of subject matter, her work is
reminiscent of other works on disasters man-made, whether pieces on Frank
Slide, Alberta, the bp oil spill or even Richard Brautigan’s infamous poem on Nova Scotia’s Springhill Mine Disaster (there were actually three mine disasters in
Springhill, but who’s counting?). I wonder: there have been anthologies over
the past couple of years exploring “eco-poetry,” but have there been any
collections or critical explorations of poems that work through environmental
disasters?

Mary
Harris “Mother” Jones

What to do when yellow

fever, husband, child,
child

child, child? She may
have lived

100,000 years, a
marriage

of action verbs &
explosives—

the more I think the
more rad

I get—mops & brooms
used to

barricade the mine
entrances

nobody wants a lady

to march one hundred child
workers

from Philly textile
mills to the

President’s house on
Long Island

so she must become the
most

dangerous America
itself

Clarke
describes those lost who, quite literally, “line the quarry,” and is not afraid
to name names and list the dead, destroyed or lost, writing out the human and
environmental costs of mining, oil drilling and other exploitations of natural
resources. Through the first section, the American prison system is explored as
well. In the first section, she writes: “dreams say it, together / who did
nothing wrong [.]” The poems in this collection explore a series of causes and
effects, some of which are quite disastrous, such as the list poem “2010
Workers’ Compensation Injuries, Illnesses, Fatalities,” the opening poem “2006
Workers’ Compensation Injury Data, United States” or the seven-stanza list poem
“Mining Disasters in the Month of January, United States,” that includes:

1846 Delaware-Hudson,
Roof Fall, Carbondale, PA, 14 killed

1883 Coulterville, Mine
Explosion, Coulterville, IL, 10 killed

1884 Crested Butte,
Mine Explosion, Crested Butte, CO, 59 killed

1886 Almy No. 4, Mine
Explosion, Almy, WY, 13 killed

1886 Newburg, Mine
Explosion, Newburg, PA, 39 killed

1891 Mammouth, Mine
Explosion, Mt. Pleasant, PA, 109 killed

Through
exploring various disasters, Clarke ends up exploring memory—“the worst
disaster since the last one”—writing about people lost through the prison
system, disasters man-made we don’t wish to think about, and just where the
accumulation of disaster upon disaster might end up taking us. “What do you love about this / world? Without what is there nothing // else to say?”